Happy birthday, kiddo

I had a feeling it’d be tough, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the way it would affect me.

Looking for a birthday card is one of those things we do on occasion. I’m sure I buy at least half a dozen a year. Probably twice that. No big whoop, yeah?

Oh, did I mention it’s for a kid?

One more wrinkle: she’s blind.

It didn’t occur to me until Friday night that I should get a card to go with our gift. It took about 15 seconds of thinking about that for me to realize that I had to find a braille card. Oh, sure, I could get a“regular” card, and her parents could read it to her. But how many cards is this kid going to have to get read to her in her life? I’d like to make ours one less. Though, we did write a note in it…so, there’s that.

I called a bunch of places. No luck.

“That’s a great suggestion for us,” said a woman at a store in Bellevue.“We should carry those.”

Yes. Yes, you should.

What I experienced was 1/one-millionth of what her parents experience (not to mention what she herself will experience over the course of her life).

It made me sad.

I was super grateful to find a place about 25 minutes away where I could get a kid appropriate card. That felt nice. But the distance made me feel the sadness.

This isn’t that hard. We should be able to make sure that people don’t have to run all over town to find things that are, well, normal.

That’s what I’d like to see normalized.

There are a lot of people (kids included) who would like to include that in their birthday celebration, I’m sure.